In the Philadelphia area they are common. Depending on your commute, you may drive by them every day multiple times.

Main Street in Norristown, a once thriving stretch with multiple theaters and stores, is now dotted with pawnshops and empty storefronts. At the intersection of Main and Markley streets sits a McDonald’s restaurant and a gas station. Across the street, is a covered structure for SEPTA’s R6 train. Behind the train’s parking lot is Stony Creek.

Familiar. But forgettable. Background.

Not for Sal Giannone. Not after living on these streets for two-and-a-half years addicted to cocaine.

How can you forget the place you once called home?

How can you forget when you once begged for change and are now the owner of a barbershop with plans to expand?

“I can’t forget where I came from or I’m doomed to repeat it. If I forget all the effort it took to get to now I’ll relive the past. Once you lose your sobriety you’ll lose everything else in your life,” said Giannone.

His hometown

Jefferson Street in Norristown is an Italian Catholic family’s dream and an SUV driver’s nightmare. Nonna can easily toss a ball of mozzarella across the narrow street to her son. Holy Saviour Church is a few blocks away, and the now-closed school was a short walk.

Giannone’s family lived on the hard-to-find-without-a-GPS street ,but it wasn’t a dream scenario. Rinaldo Giannone raised his four boys in a two-bedroom home above a garage. Giannone’s parents divorced when he was 8, and his mother had drug issues and was incarcerated for most of his childhood. When Sal was 11 years old Rinaldo, hit a pole while going 50 mph, with Sal suffering the most serious injuries. He spent more than six months at Children’s Hospital and credits them for saving his life. After the accident he went to live with his grandparents.

At Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, Giannone displayed a flair for drawing and art. “I was a good student in school and got good grades so I could get away from here. I didn’t want to be in Norristown any more.”

After graduating high school in 2003, Giannone, with a full scholarship, attended Savannah College of Art and Design.

“I was always a leader but I became a follower really quickly. When I got to college I started going to parties and neglecting work. I developed a cocaine habit,” said Giannone.

He failed out of college within a-year-and-half and returned to the place he had set out to leave. The proud words of family and friends turned into sour notes of wasted potential.

“Not in a negative way. They were stating the obvious but I took it that everyone was against me,” recalled Giannone. He felt he let the family down. Now it was him vs. them.

He left the grandparents he lived with since the accident. He left the Sunday dinners with heaping piles of spaghetti. He left his three younger brothers. Maybe he left because he thought it was his destiny.

Main Street

The top floor of a row home less than a block from the Norristown Transportation Center.

A narrow alleyway on Main Street.

The bathroom of a store near the courthouse.

They all gave Giannone they few minutes of privacy he needed to smoke crack.

“I dabbled in heroin but I didn’t find it to be my sort of thing. I’m more of an upper than a downer. I felt like this is what I was destined to be. My mother had been through this kind of lifestyle and maybe it made me fit to do it myself because people knew my mom when I was out there.”

Riding a high, there were times he recalls being awake for three days, walking Main Street approaching people asking for change. In the morning he stood in front of Dunkin’ Donut,s where he was given enough breakfast sandwiches to get him through the day. At night, he waited by the dumpster at McDonald’s for the manager to call him over. Giannone carried a few bags to the dumpster and the manager left some food on top for him.

For Giannone, food wasn’t sustenance. Neither was the shelter he found at the train alcove on Markley Street, the tent behind the train tracks on Marshall Street, or the family that was open to help.

“I refused it. I felt like a burden. I didn’t want help. I wanted to get high.”

He stole his brother’s PlayStation to pay for drugs. He estimates being arrested over 52 times for nonviolent offences like loitering, possession and paraphernalia during his two plus year stretch on the streets.

During one drug purchase, a dealer pointed a gun at Giannone’s chest thinking he was a police officer.

“It didn’t faze me. All I cared about was getting the drugs in his pocket. What was registering in my mind wasn’t I could get shot. It was ‘I hope he hurries up with this so I can get drugs.’ That’s the shameful part of it.”

Giannone wasn’t the only addicted, homeless person haunting the familiar spots. There were others, some of whom he witnessed die. The older ones, between 50 to 70 years old made him think that’s what he would be if didn’t stop. About ten to fifteen set up camp on the bank of the Stony Creek across from the former Times Herald building or under a bridge overpass on Marshall Street. Giannone formed a friendship with Anthony Parsons, who was also a homeless addict from Norristown.

“We both wanted to get high, but we cared about each other. If there is anyone in the world who knows what I’ve been through, it is him because he was there too,” said Giannone.

Parsons and Giannone shared a similar upbringing, with Parsons, 35, playing the big brother role.

“A lot of people have misconceptions about homelessness or addictions,” said Parsons who will be sober seven years in April. “When you are put in a situation you that makes you feel hopeless, if you meet someone you click with it’s easy to forge a friendship in the worst of places.”

Christmas

Sal Giannone’s Sunday dinners are definitely familiar. A table filled with a big pot of red sauce, meatballs, chicken cutlets, and salad with a know-it-by-heart-tune of voices sharing stories. For two-and-a-half years he missed Sunday dinners at his grandmother’s home. One empty chair that didn’t have to be empty.

For Italians, these types of Sunday dinners are the norm. Christmas is the Super Bowl. The culmination of all the previous regular season Sundays. The for-the-pope only china is brought out. The fish are prepared from recipes older than the cook whose grandson calls “the best known to the planet.”

“Christmas is a big deal in an Italian house,” says Giannone striking up a Marlboro Red.

Enough of a big deal to break an addiction.

On Dec. 1, 2006 Giannone was arrested when another addict he knew asked him “to go get some stuff” in a car he borrowed from his girlfriend and asked him to drive since he didn’t have a license. The car was stolen. Giannone was arrested and spent Christmas in the county jail. He got six months in jail and went to rehab for 28 days at White Deer Run.

“I felt duped. I felt stupid. I was about to miss Christmas for the second year in a row. I took that joy away from my grandparents and my family. I’m better than this and that is when the light clicked on,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I need some more self worth. I need to stop doing this to my friends, my family and myself. I have people who rely on me and brothers to set an example for and all I ever did was set the wrong kind of example.”

At the time of his arrest, Giannone was a 110-pound, 21-year-old, worn from over two years of homelessness and addiction.

He marks Dec. 1, 2006, as the day he got sober. He admits, at that point partaking in drugs since he was 11 years old.

“I did drugs and drank but was productive. People would stay off my back if I got good grades. If I smoked a little weed it wasn’t’ a big deal. But it was a big deal. It set my inhibitions up to be able to say, ‘What’s a little bit of coke?’ When they say weed is gateway drug, it is,” admitted Giannone.

“I was being a bum. I should have went out and got a job and realized my potential sooner. When you’re in that addict frame of mind. And it’s in your blood … my mom and dad were addicts … you want to … break the mold but it’s not always that easy. Sometimes people are programmed to have addictive personalities. That was me. Once I got the high, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. There was nothing I could do to stop myself. That’s why some people don’t get addicts and don’t understand how hard it is to pick up the pieces. I was the problem. I was wrong.”

He takes a long drag of the cigarette, squinting into the morning sun.

“I always thought I was the victim. Poor me. I never took accountability. Accountability and responsibility are not easy,” said Giannone.

During his rehab, the reinforcement he received made him realize the person he was in the past was not the person he was supposed to be. Seven months into his sobriety he met Kristen, the woman who became his wife, and who supported him by going to meetings, often multiple times a week.